Herald News: School safety

STUDENTS at Totowa's two elementary schools have a new adult in their weekday lives: the armed police officer. The local cops will work two shifts to guard the borough's children, with one officer a shift stationed in Memorial School and two stationed in Washington Park School.

This plan was in the works before the shootings in Newtown, Conn. After, it appears, it took on a new urgency.

"There is no one in the school district that can take out a shooter," Vincent Varcadipane, the district superintendent, told Staff Writer Matthew McGrath. "We're basically defenseless here."

The district wants to protect its children, and is willing to lay out $180,000 a year in police salaries to do it. We understand the fierce desire and the rush to take some kind of action, but disagree that hiring someone to "take out a shooter" is the right solution.

Here's some math to consider: one police officer with one gun holding about 15 bullets equals 15; one gunman carrying multiple weapons, likely with magazines holding from 30 to 100 rounds, equals — at the very least — 60. Add to that 60 the x factor of surprise, planning and a desire to die, and that one police officer is significantly outmatched.

Columbine High School's resource officer fired four shots at Eric Harris from 60 feet away – the officer was eating lunch in the parking lot at the time. Harris returned fire and went back into the school.

About a third of all public schools in the country already have armed security officers, yet school shootings continue. If all public schools hired armed guards to protect students, the next logical question is, where does it stop?

To do the job right, guards would have to be stationed on the playing fields, school buses and street corners near school. What about Little League games? What about Chuck E. Cheese? Public libraries? And why only protect the young? What about the old and the sick? That would mean armed guards in nursing homes, hospitals and health clinics. And how would we account for the wounding or deaths of bystanders, mistakenly shot by guards trying to take out the killer?

The National Rifle Association would have us believe that a gun in every school is the answer. It's a bald ploy to sell more firearms and hook kids on gun ownership by planting in their impressionable minds an association between learning, safety and guns. It's like hooking kids on cigarettes with cute animals and candy flavors.

But meeting gun violence with a gun is not the answer. Rather than hiring armed guards, school districts should band together and demand that Washington and states pass tougher gun laws. The nation has to figure out how to keep elementary school students, and moviegoers, and college kids and mall shoppers safe. Simply throwing more guns into the mix won't work.

Totowa is the only school district in Bergen and Passaic counties that has opted to hire armed guards. We hope it stays that way.